



DEEPER 


El 


ANNIE STEGER 
WINSTON 


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THE 

DEEPER VOICE 


BY 

ANNIE STEGER WINSTON 

AUTHOR OF “MEMOIRS OF A CHILD” 



NEW 



YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



COPYRIGHT, 1923, 

BY THE SUNDAY SCHOOL BOARD 
OF THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION 

GIFT 

PUBLISHES 
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THE DEEPER VOICE. II 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 





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TO 

L. G. W. 


























































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INTRODUCTION 


To present eternal verities with the sim¬ 
plicity of a child and to magnify childlike¬ 
ness as the quality most nearly eternal is 
an achievement for which the thoughtful 
reader may well be grateful. Miss Winston 
has accomplished no less than this in the 
pages which follow. As an answer to the 
unrest of human hearts, to the dreams of 
philosophic speculation, to the gropings of 
new cults, to the longing of honest intelli¬ 
gence for highest expression, she urges, with 
no less charm than conviction, an humble 
faith in Jesus Christ. 

In language not argumentative but beau¬ 
tifully convincing the author limits such 
faith to those who are willing to become “as 
a little child.” By a remarkably clear anal¬ 
ysis of child nature she explains the natural 

[vii] 


INTRODUCTION 


approach to the great realities and exposes 
the utter futility of rationalism in the realm 
of religion and the emptiness of mere intel- 
lectualism in the search for God. 

A host of earnest, intelligent readers will 
thank Miss Winston for this charming 
little book. 

John L. Hill 

Nashville, Tenn. 


[Yiii] 


FOREWORD 


Our faith suffers to-day in a twofold way: 
from shock, leading to blank pessimism; 
and from arid rationalism. In these pages 
I have tried to show that the one remedy 
for these twin evils lies in the “childlike¬ 
ness” of approach to Christianity enjoined 
by Christ; also what “childlikeness” is, as 
seen in the light of actual childhood. 








CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I THE WAY HOME .... 15 

II AS A LITTLE CHILD ... 21 

III ENTERING INTO LIFE ... 39 

IY HUMBLING AND EXALTING . . 55 

V OUT OF THE NIGHT ... 67 

VI THE DEEPER VOICE .... 77 

VII THE NEW SENTIMENTALISM . . 89 

VIII MOVING MOUNTAINS . . . 101 

IX SHALL HE FIND FAITH? . . 119 

X CONCLUSION. 129 








Chapter I 

THE WAY HOME 


I will even make a way in the wilderness. 

Isaiah 43 , 19 

\ 

Verily I say unto you, whoever shall not 
receive the kingdom of God as a little child , 
he shall not enter therein. 


Mark 10 , 15 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


Chapter I 
THE WAY HOME 

Most of us ? nowadays, feel the need of 
finding our way home out of wildernesses 
of perplexity, confusion, dismay—there has 
been, and is, so much we cannot under¬ 
stand, or easily reconcile with our precon¬ 
ceived ideas of the providences of a merciful 
and loving Father. Dimly discernible 
though it may be that the perturbations 
of this distracted world are groanings and 
travailings presaging not death but birth, 
the birth of better things, so frail are we 
amid it all, so helpless in the clutch of cir¬ 
cumstance, the very goodness of God ceases 
to be a certainty to be carelessly assumed. 
It becomes a faith to be fought for. 

[ 15 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


That careless assumption of the “good¬ 
ness of God” formerly so popular, especially 
in the essentially irreligious eighteenth cen¬ 
tury, was never, perhaps, very valuable. 
Elegant compliments to the accomplished 
Creator of an elegant universe (in which 
Betelgeuse was still a negligibly tiny point 
of light) were graceful genuflexions of poetic 
philosophy, far more seemly than the fierce 
questionings of God’s goodness which have 
become a commonplace of to-day’s litera¬ 
ture, but distinctly less vital. 

I sometimes think it is well that so wide 
a gulf has opened between faith and un¬ 
faith, forcing us to take account of where 
we stand. Faith, in reality, was never the 
facile thing it seemed when faith was in 
fashion, and drowsy assent to prevalent 
opinion easily enough passed muster in its 
stead. The faith which has “decayed” was 
in great measure the mere fashion of faith, 
leaving the world but little the poorer. 

The trial of our faith worketh patience: 

[ 16 ] 


THE WAY HOME 


the patience of firm foothold upon the solid 
rock of confidence, now, as ever, attainable 
by the children of God. The way home is 
yet open: the way to a trust in God which 
is sole antidote for that distrust of life 
which has fallen upon men. But the way 
to that trust, I am persuaded, is more than 
ever a strait and narrow one. The slen¬ 
der bridge across unfathomable gulfs of 
darkness is the revelation of God in Jesus 
Christ, and that only. 

With a new force to-day seem to come 
the words: No man cometh unto the Father 
but by me. The growth of knowledge but 
makes more evident to us the mystery of 
the universe, the hopelessness of effort to 
reach the Ultimate. Even the dim feel¬ 
ing that some “divine event” is being 
ushered in by the conflicts of human his¬ 
tory, does little to reassure us. What are 
outcomes so remote to us, frail creatures 
of an hour? And what, perhaps, are we, 
but grist for his mighty mill? 

[ 17 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


In Jesus Christ, and in him alone, is the 
reassurance we need. He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father, sums up life’s 
supreme comfort; in that it makes the Un¬ 
known God indeed our Father. Christ the 
divine Word out of the heart of God an¬ 
swers all—all that needs to be answered. 

But none may find him but those who 
come in the spirit of the little child. 


[ 18 ] 


Chapter II 

AS A LITTLE CHILD 




Chapter II 


AS A LITTLE CHILD 

Have we ever, I wonder, really stopped to 
consider what Christ meant by his injunc¬ 
tion of childlikeness? 

In all the storehouse of the world’s imagi¬ 
nation, there is no more beautiful and 
touching picture than that of Christ draw¬ 
ing a little wondering child into the circle 
of his disciples, putting his arm about him, 
half in reassurance, half in such instinctive 
caress as we ourselves are moved to by the 
sweetness of childhood, and by him teaching 
the lesson of the Kingdom. It was a scene 
which could not but make deep impress 
upon the minds of men, it was at once so 
strange and so natural, so human and so 
divine; it was so illuminative both of Christ 

[ 21 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

and of the child. It was a scene which 
rendered contempt of childhood forever im¬ 
possible. 

Antiquity consistently differentiated the 
child in terms of deficiency; invariably upon 
the psychical side; almost invariably even 
upon the physical. A typical family in 
ancient art is a man and a woman and a 
slanting row of smaller and smaller men 
and women, uncompromisingly adult in all 
save size down to the very tot at the end 
of the line and as destitute of individuality 
as a row of ampersands. It is not, we see 
plainly, that there is failure to portray 
childhood. It is that there is no effort to 
portray it. Obviously, the child is consid¬ 
ered, not as a child, but as somebody’s off¬ 
spring, as a man-to-be, and represented, half 
symbolically, with the minimum of emphasis 
upon the lowly estate of immaturity. 

The wise king himself, who studied trees 
from the cedar that was in Lebanon to the 
hyssop that sprang out of the wall, beasts 

[ 22 ] 


AS A LITTLE CHILD 


also and fowl, and creeping things and 
fishes, never had, we may be sure, the re¬ 
motest thought of studying the child. 
What was there to study in the mere nega¬ 
tion of wisdom and experience? 

The achievement of individuality followed 
the achievement of positive value; rapidly 
upon the physical side, slowly upon the psy¬ 
chical; so slowly that recognition of the 
child’s mental life as differing from the 
adult’s otherwise than by defect is one of the 
most distinctively modern notes of our civ¬ 
ilization. Almost down to our own day— 
centuries after every picture-gallery in 
Christendom overflowed with loving delinea¬ 
tions of that which is distinctive in the outer 
seeming of childhood—its inner being was 
conceived in the old negative, relative way; 
and the ideal child, as reflected in the poor 
little prigs, the pitiful little monsters of 
precocity, to which literature gave grudg¬ 
ing place, was substantially the mannikin of 
old-world representation: the child purged 

[ 23 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

to the uttermost of the reproach of child¬ 
ishness. 

To-day we may and do smile at the con¬ 
tent of what Tennyson, sounding the new 
note of reverence for childhood, calls “the 
deep brain of dauntless infancy/’ in our 
growing insight descrying undreamed-of ig¬ 
norances and simplicities, but the driest 
manual of pedagogy, tacitly or explicitly, 
recognizes in the child traits which are the 
Open Sesame to the great things of life; 
traits which survive in earth’s greatest only. 
And yet our conceptions of childlikeness re¬ 
main as narrow, as slightly related to that 
fulfillment of humanity’s highest possibili¬ 
ties which is the Kingdom of God, as that of 
earlier generations, which saw in childhood 
only limitations. We remain content to say, 
more or less perfunctorily, “Childhood is hu¬ 
mility.” Though in truth humility, as we 
are prone to conceive humility, is far enough 
from being a characteristic of the normal 
child. 


[ 24 ] 


AS A LITTLE CHILD 


“Not of the modern child, and the Ameri¬ 
can child, in particular,’’ it may he retorted 
—“but it was not of it that Christ spoke.” 

Ah, but it was, I think. “This little 
child,” is the child universal, the child un¬ 
changing through all the ages; in all alike 
sublimely far from the self-contempt which 
we are apt to misname humility. The tiny 
dark-browed boy who paused in his play in 
the streets of Jerusalem as King Solomon 
swept by, knew no truckling of the spirit, 
had no impulse of self-abasement. No sense 
of inferiority, even, was his, nor any other 
feeling born of a self alien and opposed to 
that which confronted it. Who knows 
whether he did not murmur to himself, 
“That’s me!” after the fashion of the street 
child of to-day, warming toward some vi¬ 
sion of beauty and elegance? 

How often one has heard some small tat¬ 
tered negro girl unctuously exclaim, “That’s 
me!” pointing out some as accurate con¬ 
trast, in the shape of some beautiful, richly- 

[ 25 ] 



THE DEEPER VOICE 


clad woman, as the resources of society 
could well afford. And clearly she does not 
mean, simply, “That is what I wish I might 
become.” Unmistakably, there is some dim 
rapture of present participation in the oth¬ 
er’s glories, some occult appropriation of 
them. 

What is there that the child does not ap¬ 
propriate? It is he who is “owner of the 
sphere—of the seven stars and the solar 
year”; he w T ho is real lord of creation, hold¬ 
ing in fee not beggarly acres, but the world 
in its entirety. “My moon,” “My stars,” 
“My sun,” he says, and feels them to be his 
—as they are his; far more his than any 
man’s; manhood knowing how to possess 
only in severalty. 

All things are the child’s—and the man’s 
—in just such degree as he gives himself 
to all. Nothing is mine into which I do 
not put myself; least of all the Kingdom 
of God, before which stands for every man 
a wall of obstruction of his own raising. 

[ 26 ] 



AS A LITTLE CHILD 

There stands no wall of obstruction of his 
own raising, for the little child, before any¬ 
thing. He is self-excluded from nothing. 
He would, if he could, “hold creation in his 
little cup,” and drink it smiling. His Me 
—that Me which so inexorably determines 
the Mine—has none of the paltriness which 
life is so fatally apt to bring. 

There is in Pepys’ Diary a sordidly 
tragic story of a poor girl who killed her¬ 
self because “for a long time she had not 
liked herself, nor anything she did.” Noth¬ 
ing could be further than this from the 
spirit of childhood. The humility of the 
child—his key to many kingdoms—does not 
consist in haying a low opinion of himself, 
or even in having a just opinion. Ask him, 
Which is prettier, you or Mary? and he will 
cheerfully and unhesitatingly answer, “Me!” 
—if he is a healthy-minded child whose fine 
un-self-consciousness has not been tampered 
with. It is with him a question of loyalty 
and not of judgment, and his innocent pref- 

[ 27 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


erence is for the small, ever-present person 
whom he calls Me—a Me so objective that 
he may almost feel for it an attachment not 
radically different from that he entertains 
for his family and friends. To this Me he 
instinctively appropriates the ascription of 
prettiness, or any other praise, as he would 
any other desirable thing; not loving his 
fellow less, only himself more. 

It is, I repeat, an innocent preference. 
He loves himself more, and yet so little ab¬ 
sorbingly that he has room in consciousness 
for an infinity of other things—things in no 
way related to his small private interests. 
His real treasure is in the enthralling spec¬ 
tacle of life which is spread before his 
young unwearied eyes, and there his heart 
is. And while his heart is there it is his. 
So long, and no longer. 

The keynote of childhood is outward ref¬ 
erence. It is not of itself it thinks but of 
the More Beyond—that More Beyond upon 
which it must draw for the elements of 

[ 28 ] 



AS A LITTLE CHILD 


growth, if it is to grow.—And if it is not 
to grow, it is not childhood, whatever its 
years may he. 

The endless questions of the child, it must 
be admitted, import something of strain, for 
any adult, into his prolonged society. So 
much so that even the most ardent child- 
lover is capable at times of inklings of sym¬ 
pathy with Mrs. Pipchin when she invented, 
for the chastening of Paul Dombey’s spirit 
of inquiry, the legend of the little boy who 
would ask questions, and was gored to death 
by a mad bull;—but nothing illustrates 
more forcibly that largeness of relation, that 
outreach to the universe, which is the glory 
of the child’s mind. 

Open-eyed in a world of marvels, it is no 
wonder that his questions are not to be 
effectually stemmed by any flimsy barrier 
which we may erect of precept and admoni¬ 
tion. He sees all, and claims all; annexing 
all to the dominion of his mind—which sal¬ 
lies out to possess it. The philosopher may 

[ 29 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


say, I take all knowledge for my province; 
the child, without saying, does so. He rec¬ 
ognizes no irrelevancies, no difficulties. 
Whatever fact he encounters must stand and 
deliver its reason. 

It is with his usual delicate precision that 
Tennyson chooses for childhood the epithet 
“dauntless.” There is nothing which its 
mind will not essay. In his naive way the 
child gropes for laws and principles and 
the nature of things. It is above all, per¬ 
haps, this radical nature of his questions 
which makes them trying to adult patience. 
In his simplicity he makes his questions too 
hard. He asks the unanswerable, and in¬ 
sists upon an answer. 

They are such foolish questions! We 
complain, when the worm of our patience 
turns, and will submit no longer. What 
difference can it make to anybody where 
the wind comes from, why fire burns and 
cold freezes, what becomes of the dark when 
you turn on the light—and the thousand 

[ 30 ] 


AS A LITTLE CHILD 


and one like problems to which the mind of 
the child inclines? 

Nothing is more patent to the average 
adult intelligence than the futility of ask¬ 
ing the unanswerable; nothing more remote 
from its ordinary habit. “Why do you want 
to know so-and-so ?” sometimes, question- 
weary, we say to the child. And the child, 
contentedly or abashedly as the case may 
be, answers, “Because.” He has no such 
reason as the ordinary adult has when he 
seeks fact; he has only such reason as the 
extraordinary adult has when he seeks 
truth. His reason is general, not particu¬ 
lar. It is a thirst of the mind; a thirst 
which in most of us his elders has grown so 
unimperative as not to be recognized as a 
reason. 

I am a man and nothing which pertains 
to humanity is foreign to me, is the language 
of ideality. I am a child, and nothing which 
pertains to humanity is foreign to me, is 
closer to sober fact. The actual attitude of 

[ 31 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


the average man might be summed up in 
the words: I am John Smith, and nothing 
which does not have direct and immediate 
bearing upon the comfort or credit of John 
Smith is any concern of mine. It is this 
attitude, this self-imprisonment in the pale 
of the narrowly personal, which is abso¬ 
lutely and totally and above all else pro¬ 
hibitive of entrance into that kingdom 
whose very keynote is expansion. 

The question, What is it to me? which 
stands ever as a sentinel at the threshold 
of the adult’s consciousness, is apparently 
unknown to the child; but it is only that 
he takes himself broadly, and so feels a 
wider pertinency. In face of the compell¬ 
ing problem of the universe, the child has 
scant leisure for self-definition. Instinc¬ 
tively, as human, he takes to himself the 
whole heritage of humanity. Only as won¬ 
der and wistfulness fade, and the thoughts 
turn inward, does there emerge in conscious- 

[ 32 ] 


AS A LITTLE CHILD 

ness a smaller self with narrower and more 
ignoble claims; a self with no part nor lot 
in the large things of earth—to say noth¬ 
ing of the larger things of the kingdom of 
heaven. 

Specialization is the surest work of life; 
specialization of consciousness, a specializa¬ 
tion of claim. Even my sense of self is spe¬ 
cialized. I am not to myself the sum of all 
that pertains to my personality, but only 
the sum of certain selected factors, which 
tend steadily to lessen, until a man's idea 
of himself grows small enough to make the 
angels weep. 

“The ethical man,” says a modern writer, 
“must think of God as thinking of him ” 
But who can think of God as thinking of the 
senior member of such and such a firm, or 
the champion golf-player of such and such 
a country club, or the most prominent citi¬ 
zen of Blankville? If I am to think of God 
as thinking of me, I must have some self of 

[ 33 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


which I can conceive his thinking; a self a 
little lower than the angels. 

How could the publican, when he prayed 
side by side with the Pharisee in the Tem¬ 
ple, have said, God be merciful to me, Sim¬ 
eon or Levi, disreputable collector of taxes? 
What could a disreputable tax-collector be 
to God, or his squalid misdoings, that he 
should take account of them, for mercy or 
judgment? But the one who prayed was not 
to himself the tax-collector, disreputable or 
otherwise—but the sinner. As the sinner— 
the being designed by God for better things 
—what more fitting than the cry, God be 
merciful to me—and make me what I was 
meant to be? 

Not many rich, not many great, not many 
mighty, may inherit the kingdom of God, 
because not many rich, not many great, not 
many mighty may cease to be to themselves 
the rich, the great, the mighty, and become 
more, as a man must needs become if he 
would inherit that kingdom. The highest 

[ 34 ] 



AS A LITTLE CHILD 


possible conception of self is a necessity; 
and the highest is the broadest. 

Humbling is not a lessening of self, but 
an enlarging; not a lowering of self, but on 
the contrary ascent to the highest plane of 
selfhood, upon which all men may meet as 
fellows. Let me think nobly enough of my¬ 
self, and I can despise no man. For what 
I will value in myself will not be those minor 
things which make my distinctions, what¬ 
ever they may chance to be, but those greater 
things which all humanity holds in com¬ 
mon. It will be as a human soul, made in 
the image of God, and capable of indefinite 
advance toward the divine, that I will value 
myself, and valuing myself as such, as such 
will I value all men. Let me think nobly 
enough of myself, and I will think little 
enough. It is the meaner self which will not 
suffer itself to be forgotten, and its service 
which is slavery. This self must die if I am 
to possess my possessions in things divine; 
die as a circle dies in water, through widen- 

[ 35 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

ing and ever widening into circles larger 
and fainter. When it shall have died, then 
shall I rise to my being’s height—and see 
God. 


[36] 



Chapter III 

ENTERING INTO LIFE 








Chapter III 


ENTERING INTO LIFE 

“My experience,” says William James, “is 
what I agree to attend to”—an inexorable 
law which sets limits even to my landscapes. 
I was passing one day on the street car 
through a dusty and unattractive suburb, 
having with me a little child. The sordid¬ 
ness of the surroundings depressed me—un¬ 
til suddenly the child plucked my sleeve. 
“Look,” he said, “that’s pretty!” and fol¬ 
lowing his delighted gaze, I saw the city I 
had left behind rising as lovely in the haze 
of distance as a city of dreams. 

The scope of my interest is the measure of 
my world; and so measured, the world of 
the child is relatively far wider than the 
world of the adult. It is a world stretch¬ 
ing away to misty horizons which hint of 

[ 39 ] 



THE DEEPER VOICE 


more beyond, instead of terminating in 
blank walls of indifference beyond which is 
nothingness. I know no better way of com¬ 
ing out into a large place than to put my 
hand in the hand of a little child, and to 
suffer him to lead me to his own ground. 
It is absolute escape from the sordid, the 
narrow, the paltry. The cares of this world, 
and the deceitfulness of riches, thought for 
the morrow, vain regret, and restless ambi¬ 
tion, pride, passion, prejudice, the strife of 
tongues, “laughters and contempts”—all are 
left behind; and one may breathe the free 
air of that larger world which lies beyond 
“the world”; that larger world where alone 
may be found God, or any other of life’s 
great realities. 

By very grace of circumstances, the child 
dwells beyond the “world’s” close pale, or 
childhood were impossible. The mind of the 
child has other and higher business than to 
ponder the questions, What shall w T e eat? 
What shall we drink? Wherewithal shall 

[ 40 ] 


ENTERING INTO LIFE 


we be clothed?—namely, establishment of 
relations with the universe, visible and in¬ 
visible. The most helpless, the most unen¬ 
dowed with specific instincts of any young 
creature, all that he has of power and ca¬ 
pacity he must use, and use to the utter¬ 
most, in making terms with the strange new 
system of things into which he has entered. 

We are apt to forget the magnitude of the 
task with which the child grapples, and 
grapples so successfully—without so much 
as suspecting that it is a task. He must 

i 

discover his world, and learn to meet his 
conditions; nay, he must discover himself; 
and in so doing must take account of num¬ 
berless intangibilities; laws of nature, prop¬ 
erties of matter, time, space, personality, 
and what not: things far enough, it would 
seem, from the domain of childish thought. 
But in truth the child is ever a learner, and 
a learner of large things. “Man learns more 
in the first three years of childhood,” says 
Jean Paul, “than in the three years of col- 

[ 41 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


lege life.” When he ceases to learn large 
things; when he turns from the pursuit of 
truth and law, and sets himself to consider 
only hard fact and practical consequence, as 
with the child of extreme poverty is too 
often a sad necessity, he ceases to be a child. 
Wiser in his generation than the child of 
the normal home as is the child of the slums, 
incomparably more mature in type, it is a 
wisdom which makes the heart bleed, a ma¬ 
turity which is no less than a tragedy. 

As the child has power and instinct of 
vital response, so it is given to him, as so 
alone it is given to any. “Desire and curi¬ 
osity,” says Stevenson, “are the eyes through 
which man sees the world in the most en¬ 
chanted colors.” The visible universe itself 
grows dark and pale to paling interest; 
grows as it were invisible to eyes too dull 
to note it. Through the two eyes of desire 
and curiosity the child sees a world which 
is indeed enchanted. Sordid, truly, must be 
the surroundings which can make life sor- 

[ 42 ] 


ENTERING INTO LIFE 


did to the child; and even so it can be done 
only through the undermining of vitality. 
With “health and a day,” the child can, in 
sober truth, fulfill the philosopher’s boast 
and “beggar the pomp of the Caesars.” With 
health and a day, the philosopher may be 
rich, but not so rich as the child, by just 
so much as his power and instinct vitally to 
possess his possessions are less. What does 
the philosopher, or any other adult, know 
of the pure sensuous delight there is in the 
everyday things of earth—the color of a 
broken bit of glass, the silky smoothness of 
the down of a weed, the unsung fragrance 
of some opprobriously named pest of the 
garden? Nor is the child’s response to na¬ 
ture sensuous only. Who is there who can¬ 
not remember a deep inarticulate awe of na¬ 
ture’s soul; a sense of something behind it 
all and in it all; making the common earth 
seem now and again a sort of holy ground 
which one trod trembling? 

Alive in all his senses, the sensible world 

[ 43 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

is preeminently the child’s. But the sensi¬ 
ble world is only part of his domain. The 
world of imagination is his also, because he 
really lives in it. A charming modern pic¬ 
ture shows a little child, enthroned, with 
regal robe and crown, bearing in its tiny 
hands scepter and orb—an orb which is the 
world. And upon its face is the secret of 
its sovereignty—that look of breathless, 
wide-eyed entrancement which all who love 
childhood know; of absorption so rapt as to 
hold in suspension even the laughter of sheer 
delight which shows in every curve and dim¬ 
ple. The picture is named The Luxury of 
Vain Imagination. The realm of Vain 
Imagination is indeed the child’s: the realm 
of phantasy and of faerie; but his too the 
realm of imagination not vain: the realm of 
unknown realities and of things unseeable. 
Be the age what it may, heaven still lies 

4 

about “infancy”; and not a heaven which is 
the mere vacuity of innocence, but that 
heaven which is the presence of God. 

[ 44 ] 


ENTERING INTO LIFE 

Whoever told a child about God and 
found the thought strange to it—or unwel¬ 
come? With so little of prompting that it 
would be marvelous, if it were not a phe¬ 
nomenon so absolutely familiar, the little 
one receives God as one of the great reali¬ 
ties of life, as his artless questions show; 
those questions of all the child’s multiplex 
questions the most distinctively childlike. 

“The child,” says Compayre, “naturally 
lives in a medium which is, so to speak, su¬ 
pernatural.” And consequently he realizes 
God to an extent of which the average adult 
knows nothing—crude and imperfect as his 
idea of him must of necessity be. God to 
the little child is a personality and not an 
abstraction, and ever in consciousness or 
subconsciousness an abiding Presence. 

A small friend of mine one night stoutly 
refused to say his usual formula of prayer; 
he had something so much more interesting 
to say to God. Kneeling, he broke into the 
eager announcement, “God, I caught a light- 

[ 45 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


ning-bug!”—“Make me a good boy,” be did 
append carelessly, after bis friendly recital 
of the tremendous adventure of the “light¬ 
ning-bug”; append, if not as a pure conces¬ 
sion to the conventionalities of the occasion, 
certainly as a distinctly minor matter. No 
four-year-old boy considers it a question of 
pressing importance what sort of boy he 
shall be. Goodness, except as associated 
with specific acts, is to him an extremely 
pale abstraction. Such words at first are 
merely words;—though not in vain the child 
utters from day to day his little prayer to 
God to make him good; if only that it 
teaches him that goodness is, and is, some¬ 
how, of God. 

Astonishingly soon, all things considered, 
the child’s relation to God becomes ethical. 
The little boy just mentioned—however lit¬ 
tle idea he might have of abstract goodness 
—showed, not seldom, the keenest sense of 
God’s surveillance, and of his accountability 
to him; showed it sometimes in ways suffi- 

[ 46 ] 


ENTERING INTO LIFE 

ciently quaint. One day his mother discov¬ 
ered a mouse-hole, with house-wifely horror, 
and hurriedly called to him to bring her 
something with which to stop it up. He 
paused with a countenance thoughtful and 
perturbed. “What would God think?” he 
said. 

God to the child, I repeat, is a great Real¬ 
ity—of whose nature his intuitions are, in 
the w y ords of Dr. Mark Baldwin, “surpris¬ 
ingly beautiful and true.” The same little 
boy, in saying his prayers another time, 
after asking God to bless Father and Mother 
and the other members of the family, added 
with a sudden accession of earnestness, 
“And I’ve got a humming-bird!” It was a 
little injured bird whose condition had dis¬ 
tressed him. But after committing it to 
God’s attention, he rose from his knees with 
a perfectly satisfied face. “God will take 
care of it, I reckon,” he said, “ ’cause it’s so 
little!” 

God did take care of it in the night. He 

[ 47 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


released it from pain and captivity. And 
the child marveled, it may be, at the seem¬ 
ingly unanswered appeal. Yet w T ith child¬ 
hood’s distinctive power of adjustment, 
doubtless, his faith met the shock. It was 
only one more mystery in a world of mys¬ 
teries. 

The child dwells ever in a world of mys¬ 
teries, of things haunting and elusive, of 
vistas into the unspeakable. Over him there 
broods—“a master o’er a slave—” a sense of 
the More Beyond, still demanding and still 
transcending reach. 

With all his heart, with all his soul, with 
all his mind, with all his strength, the child 
reaches out to life, and to God as one of 
the supreme facts of life, to which he must 
adjust himself. And ideality awakes and 
strengthens in the effort of adjustment. 
Least in the kingdom as the child is, not 
knowing enough of his own needs or of God’s 
majesty and perfections to feel, except in 
the most rudimentary way, the impulse of 

[ 48 ] 



ENTERING INTO LIFE 

prayer or of worship—who shall say that 
the little child is not “of the kingdom,” lit¬ 
erally and actually, while he is alive to God 
with all his small powers and capacities, and 
consciously accountable to him in all his 
ways? It is reckoned according to that 
which a man, or a child, hath, and not ac¬ 
cording to that which he hath not. What 
matter how small the child’s all is—if he 
give all ? 

The religion of childhood is a beautiful 
reality; but it is not in his religion alone 
that the child shows the manner of the king¬ 
dom ;—if indeed any part of the child’s life 
may be said to lie beyond the sphere of his 
religion. There is to the child, in truth, no 
secular; nothing absolutely divorced from 
the divine; nothing wholly mean, sordid, 
trivial; because nothing is taken meanly, 
sordidly, trivially—least of all, himself. 

“I never have seen anything like that in 
the four years since God made me!” a 
mother of my acquaintance heard her small 

[ 49 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


son murmuring over some new-found marvel 
of the insect-world. That God made him, 
evidently, was not a fact to be stored away 
in the religious compartment of his mind, 
but a part of its working equipment; a fact 
as everyday as any other fact. 

But no fact, I repeat, is “everyday,” in 
the adult sense, to the little child; none en¬ 
tirely commonplace and devoid of ideal 
value; because none is taken unvitally. 
What, after all, is the commonplace but the 
complement of some deadness of mind, of 
some callosity wrought by custom? 

“I am come that they may have life, and 
that they may have it more abundantly.” 
More life and fuller is the fundamental need 
when our world grows poor and mean; a 
need to be met only by return to that “life 
of accommodation” wdiich childhood exem¬ 
plifies, and which is the only true living. 
From sordid self-consciousness, from cramp¬ 
ing narrowness of sphere, from that spirit¬ 
ual lethargy which means spiritual death, a 

[ 50 ] 


ENTERING INTO LIFE 


man may be redeemed only through outreach 
to something beyond himself with every 
power of heart, mind, soul; some pearl of 
great price for which he must give all that 
he hath with the unreservedness of the child. 

Only that Christianity has the true virtue 
of Christianity which demands all, and fur¬ 
nishes motive sufficient to impel to the giv¬ 
ing of all, in the “constraining love of 
Christ”—that Christianity the very great¬ 
ness of which makes its eternal prerequisite 
“humbling as a little child.” 


• •• 


[ 51 ] 





Chapter IV 

HUMBLING AND EXALTING 






Chapter IV 


HUMBLING AND EXALTING 

% 

Inexorably the Me determines the Mine. 
To the rich young nobleman’s “What lack 
I yet?” Christ’s answer was the virtual 
command to be no more the “rich young 
nobleman.” It was, I think, above all, en¬ 
largement of the sense of self which he in¬ 
tended. And it was by failure to meet this 
test the young man adjudged himself un¬ 
worthy of the kingdom of God, and was 
forced to go away sorrowful. He was too 
fundamentally “the rich young nobleman.” 
He could not reach the higher plane of the 
infinitely needy human soul. 

Imperatively, to inherit that kingdom 
whose very keynote is expansion, a man 
must put aside pettiness; even the pettiness 
of his wisdom. 

One of the most striking things in Berg- 

[ 55 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


son’s philosophy is his declared belief in the 
inadequacy of mere intellect even to the 
ends of philosophy. Intuition—sheer all- 
aliveness to truth—he sees as the ultimate 
recourse in ultimate matters. It is curi¬ 
ous to note this virtual demand for child¬ 
likeness of mind, growing out of a sort of 
despair at the vastness of the vistas which 
open. Something of the same note of hu¬ 
mility is becoming discernible in physical 
science: a certain putting aside of dogma¬ 
tism and finality: tacit confession of impo¬ 
tence before seeming infinitudes of matter, 
passing through ever-lengthening, insensi¬ 
ble gradations, it may be into the imma¬ 
terial. 

Even before the cataclysm of the most 
fearful war in history, destructive of so 
much in which men had trusted, there were 
these, and other, signs of revolt from the 
arid rationalism which has been a blight 
upon every high department of human 
thought; upon religion above all: that most 

[ 56 ] 


HUMBLING AND EXALTING 


recondite and stupendous of human con¬ 
cerns, the relation of spirit with Spirit. 

Deepened recognition that there is that in 
Christianity which is too high for the hu¬ 
man intellect would not be loss, but dis¬ 
tinctly gain. It would make for that noble 
humility of mind which ever draws near¬ 
est to truth: that noble humility of mind 
without which the noblest creed may be¬ 
come, in effect, ignoble. There is a rational¬ 
istic orthodoxy, as there is a rationalistic 
heterodoxy. The very word “orthodoxy,” it 
cannot be denied, carries with it a hint of 
narrowness and rigidity; not, surely, be¬ 
cause “orthodoxy” is the great conservator 
of the great mysteries of the gospel of 
Christ, but because it means, too often, tacit 
denial of their supernal mystery; tacit as¬ 
sertion, and quite honest dull belief, of com¬ 
petence toward them—other than sheer ac¬ 
ceptance of soul. 

If indeed there is to be a return of that 

[ 57 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


more vital Christianity which the world so 
sorely needs its price must needs be hum¬ 
bling: the twofold humbling of repentance 
toward God, and of spiritual surrender to 
that which is beyond our understanding. 

About the lucid radiance of his humanity 
must forever be a penumbra of divine mys¬ 
tery. To know him must be to take account 
of that that passetli knowledge. Only so is 
there basis in him for a trust commensurate 
with the soul’s perplexities and problems, 
and life’s fathomless obscurities. 

“The ethical man must think of God as 
thinking of him.” Perhaps the most deep- 
lying root of evil in modern life has been 
the average man’s inability to “think of God 
as thinking of him’’; especially a stumbling- 
block since the opening of undreamed-of 
vastnesses of vista in the realm of nature. 
What, after all, is man in this stupendous 
universe? 

A sort of cowardice has been upon us, 
from which religion itself has not been ex- 

[ 58 ] 


HUMBLING AND EXALTING 


empt. “God—” so we have tended to say 
in our hearts—“can scarcely be greatly con¬ 
cerned about me. Why should I be very 
greatly concerned about him?” And so we 
have turned to our own devices; the device, 
above all, of human brotherhood as an all- 
sufficient religion. Does it not seem strange 
—incredible almost—that naive faith of yes¬ 
terday in the religion of human brother¬ 
hood? Sheer shallow kindness even tended 
to take rank as a substitute for religion. 
A whole school of somewhat flimsy fiction 
sprang up to exploit the idea that “pleas¬ 
antness” was all the world needed; not spar¬ 
ing incidental scathing allusion to the arch¬ 
evil—other-worldliness. 

Acute reproach resided in that term— 
other-worldliness. It was supposed to rep¬ 
resent the accurate antithesis of here-and- 
nowness, emphasis upon which was the dis¬ 
tinctive note of yesterday’s religious think¬ 
ing; an emphasis in which yesterday took a 
not unjustifiable pride. 

[ 59 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


The emphasis of yesterday’s religion upon 
here-and-nowness was not too great, though 
somewhat truculent, so to speak, in open or 
implied contrast with the religious ideals 
of less “enlightened” days. It was not too 
great. It was not, indeed, great enough— 
considered in the light of concrete applica¬ 
tion. So timorous, in truth, was yesterday 
in its conception of the “mighty works” 
which it was the function of religion to per¬ 
form. Somehow it was to promote the 
amelioration of social evils, somehow to dif¬ 
fuse abroad a blander atmosphere. Was not 
that about all? 

And it was to do even this in no way pecu¬ 
liarly its own, but merely through the dif¬ 
fusion of altruistic ideals. It was to be, in 
a word, regulatory rather than dynamic; an 
outside influence; not a force operating at 
the very center of personality. Reduced to 
such exceedingly low terms, it is scarcely 
to be wondered at that religion in popular 
opinion tended to grow negligible. 

[ 60 ] 


HUMBLING AND EXALTING 


What a man believed has not been held, 
in late years, to be of much importance; or 
even, perhaps, whether he believed anything. 
Christianity itself has tended to become lit¬ 
tle more than a moral code: a sublime and 
beautiful amplification of the second table 
of the law, and that only. Its creed was— 
creed: that almost irrelevant thing in reli¬ 
gion, any particular concern with which 
spelled that “otlier-worldliness” which was 
the especial bogy of yesterday. 

“He can’t be wrong whose life is in the 
right.” That was a tremendous saying— 
yesterday; very widely looked upon as dis¬ 
posing comfortably and conclusively of the 
whole matter of religion. “He can’t be 
wrong whose life is in the right—perhaps,” 
to-day says. “But he may be very bewil¬ 
dered, sad, daunted;—very desperately 
driven to know what lies at the heart of the 
things that are—or who: what manner of 
omnipotent Will.” 

Reassurance of God, reassurance of the 

[ 61 ] 



THE DEEPER VOICE 


hereafter, reassurance of divine meaning in 
human life and destiny—the hearts of men 
to-day are craving these things, which re¬ 
ligion alone may supply. Only that which 
supplies these things is worthy of the name 
of religion: that now is becoming clear to 
us; very much clearer than it was yester¬ 
day, when a world of well-meaning endeavor, 
it is curious now to reflect, was expended 
in limiting to the utmost the scope and func¬ 
tion of religion; in practically reducing its 
meaning to that of “social service.” “Social 
service”—widening and deepening as our 
realization is of the place of social service 
in all worthy living, and above all in the 
religious life—may no longer in effect ex¬ 
haust the meaning of “religion”; which is, 
rather, the whole answer of the divine to 
the whole necessity of the human. As that 
necessity is felt to be profound, so profound 
will be the corresponding experience of the 
divine. 

In one of the comic papers, a few years 

[ 62 ] 



HUMBLING AND EXALTING 


ago, there was a picture of an absurdly sanc¬ 
timonious individual in clerical garb ad¬ 
dressing an everyday citizen with something 
like the following challenge: “Do you ever 
think there is One above who marks your 
every thought and action? One whose eye 
is ever upon you? One in whose sight your 
very hairs are all numbered?’’ The every¬ 
day citizen grins. “I’m not so conceited as 
all that!” 

Few of us, in late years, have been so con¬ 
ceited as all that: not “conceited” enough 
even for that sense of sin which lies at the 
base and foundation of every great spiritual 
experience. For, after all, a sense of sin im¬ 
plies a certain high self-respect. “Against 
thee, thee only, have I sinned and done this 
evil in thy sight!” is a cry of inherent dig¬ 
nity and claim; one which the soul can ut¬ 
ter only in view of its utmost possibilities 
of relationship with the divine. 

In the depths of my soul I must find God, 
if I am to find him; find him as the answer 

[ 63 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


to an infinite need. Morbid introspection is 
happily past as a valued element of reli¬ 
gious experience, but deepened recognition 
of what we are and what we might be is 
essential to that hunger and thirst after 
righteousness which is hunger -and thirst 
after God. 

Forever, Repent! must preface, “The 
kingdom of God is at hand.” In repentance 
—“repentance toward God”—the most ig¬ 
noble life takes on a sort of nobility. The 
feeder of swine comes to himself and ascends 
again to sonship: sonship, however trem¬ 
bling and ashamed, which looks toward the 
Father’s house—as home. 


[64] 


Chapter V 

OUT OF THE NIGHT 




Chapter V 


OUT OF THE NIGHT 

How intensely personal a thing Chris¬ 
tianity is—primarily and essentially—we 
have been very prone during recent years 
to forget. We have even made a virtue of 
turning from that conception of it, as par¬ 
taking too much of the individualism of the 
benighted past. The past was compara¬ 
tively benighted in its “individualism”—in 
its imperfect sense of the solidarity of so¬ 
ciety. And yet the reaction from that indi¬ 
vidualism may go too far, as it has gone, I 
venture to assert, in the changes which it 
has wrought in our Christianity. 

In the supreme moments of life, the pres¬ 
ent fact is never the solidarity of society, 

/ 

but rather the essential solitude of the hu- 

[ 67 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


man soul, the separateness with which it 
must face the eternities. It is a separate¬ 
ness which admits but one companionship: 
that of the eternal divine Companion. 

Christianity exalts the importance of the 
one; it speaks to souls singly. The laws it 
lays down are not primarily laws of so¬ 
ciety but laws of self-government, more pro¬ 
foundly assuring the corporate good. It 
speaks, I say, to the separate soul; most of 
all to the soul appalled by the sense of sepa¬ 
rateness—or of separation. For the mes¬ 
sage of Christianity is, above all, that of 
nearness. 

The nearness of Love Divine—with all 
that that implies of Help Divine—is the 
very sum and substance of Christianity. Too 
much we have forgotten the closeness of the 
Christ, and of that kingdom which he came 
to proclaim: the kingdom of righteousness, 
peace, joy—now, as then, “at hand”; not 
sundered from the common life of men by a 
great chasm, but hard by—reachable at any 

[ 68 ] 


OUT OF THE NIGHT 


moment. But only by those capable of 
“greatening” into childlikeness of soul. 

Very far away from us God has tended 
to become. Especially when the world 
seemed established in its, upon the whole, 
very tolerable courses, its problems disap¬ 
pearing one by one under the progress of 
civilization. What more than the progress 
of civilization was really necessary? We 
look back now with a sort of wonder upon 
those days, and upon the shallow optimism 
which characterized not its lighter fiction 
alone but its philosophy and its religion; 
though not without undercurrents of pessi¬ 
mism of the blackest and bitterest. 

Never was there a lonelier or more defiant 
cry than Henley—true son of his genera¬ 
tion—utters out of a sense of a world left 
to itself, a universe in brute enmity to man: 

Out of the night that circles me, 

Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 

I thank whatever gods there be 
For my unconquerable soul. 

[ 69 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winced nor cried aloud. 

Under the bludgeoning of chance 
My head is bloody but unbowed. 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the Horror of the shade, 

And still the menace of the years 
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid. 

It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishments the scroll, 

I am the master of my fate, 

I am the captain of my soul. 

Optimism and pessimism alike sounded 
the note of human self-reliance. “Orthodox” 
Christianity itself minimized emphasis upon 
man’s dependence upon God. It was the era 
of self-sufficiency, with God very far off, and 
not of exigent importance. Man, to an al¬ 
most unparalleled extent, was unoccupied 
with him, incurious concerning him. 

Then the depths were broken up. Scarcely 
since the world began has the flood of trag¬ 
edy risen so high as in our day: tragedies 

[ 70 ] 


OUT OF THE NIGHT 


of life, of fortune, of the affections; dead¬ 
lier and darker tragedies of debasements, 
cruelties, hatreds, bestializations. Civiliza¬ 
tion? Civilization itself has stood—and 
perhaps yet stands—in danger of being 
swept away like a leaf upon a torrent’s tide. 
The self-sufficiency of the human? The 
worst tragedies of these tumultuous years, 
I repeat, have been tragedies not of the body 
but of the soul: the breaking forth from it 
as of the very flames of Hell. Well may 
man shrink at the thought of w T hat is latent 
in man, and feel impelled to reach out to 
some higher than he. Man, after all, is not 
sufficient unto himself, even for the closing 
of the doors of his soul against the foulness 
of the Pit. There must, there must, be help 
somewhere; help commensurate with the 
need. There is—the very necessities of the 
case require a sort of assurance. 

Beyond all question, there is a faint, un¬ 
mistakable rekindling of hope in the divine. 
“The will to believe” has awakened in direc- 

[ 71 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


tions in which it was dormant; dead, seem¬ 
ingly. Anxiously erstwhile blankly indif¬ 
ferent eyes strain toward God—with wist¬ 
fulness at the very least. It is as if the 
heart of the world were whispering, “I w T ill 
arise and go to my Father.” 

From very far countries that note sounds; 
from regions of practical heathenism; of 
that complete and scornful agnosticism 
which has of late years been a sort of badge 
of intellectual superiority. A totally new 
impulse by wisdom to search out God is 
manifest; new, and yet immemorially old— 
and eternally futile. It is but to make the 
round of guesses belonging to the very child¬ 
hood of the race, and even then unsufficing. 
It is but to find on old, old paths, the same 
old no-thoroughfares. 

Incomparably nobler and more exalting 
than sheer indifference as is outreach to 
God, the blindest, most impotent, most grop¬ 
ing—to such degree is the outreach of the 
“wise” blind, impotent, groping, as to dem- 

[ 72 ] 


OUT OF THE NIGHT 

onstrate above all the need of recourse to 
him who could say: I am the light of the 
world. He that cometh to me shall not walk 
in darkness. 


[ 73 ] 








Chapter VI 

THE DEEPER VOICE 






Chapter VI 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

No man ever strove harder than William 
James “by wisdom” to find God; or more 
frankly and sorrowfully confessed the fu¬ 
tility of that endeavor. His early manhood 
was darkened by terrible depression arising 
from this cause; his despondency even tak¬ 
ing the form of “panic fear.” 

“I remember wondering how other peo¬ 
ple could live, how I myself had ever lived, 
so unconscious of that pit of insecurity be¬ 
neath the surface of life.—The fear was so 
invasive and powerful that, if I had not 
clung to scripture-texts like The eternal God 
is my refuge, etc., Come unto me all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, etc., I am the 
Resurre ctio n and the Life, etc., I think I 
should Have grown really insane.” (“Let- 

[ 77 ] 


THE DEEPEK VOICE 


ters of William James,” Vol. I, page 145 ff.) 

But these words, to him, were, after all, 
rather empty words; lacking real “sub¬ 
stance” of faith. He tried to make his way 
to God through the medium of philosophy 
—and failed. He could even write flip¬ 
pantly—after years of agonizing effort—to 
a friend who protested against his “super¬ 
stitious tendencies”: 

“I doubt whether you will find any great 
harm in the God I patronize—the poor thing 
is so largely an ideal possibility.” (“Let¬ 
ters,” Vol. II, page 270.) 

All, in the end, that he had of belief— 
slight enough—was an outgrowth of sheer 
“will to believe.” 

“Why do you believe in God?” he was 
asked.—“Because you have experienced His 
presence?” 

His answer was: 

“No, but rather because I need it so that 
it ‘must’ be true.” (“Letters,” Vol. II, 
page 213.) 


[ 78 ] 



THE DEEPER VOICE 


Elsewhere he says: 

“My personal position is simple. I have 
no living sense of commerce with God. I 
envy those who have, for I know the addi¬ 
tion of such a sense would help me im¬ 
mensely.—Yet there is something in me 
[italics his] which makes response when I 
hear utterances made from that lead by 
others. I recognize the deeper voice. Some¬ 
thing tells me, ‘thither lies truth/” (“Let¬ 
ters,” Vol. II, page 211.) 

By his philosophy he did not find God, • 
but rather saw open before him the way 
toward “dogmatic atheistic naturalism,” 
some “mystical germ” alone, he explains, 
preventing his advancing unhesitatingly 
toward that goal. (“Letters,” Vol. II, page 
212.) But one thing he did find, and made 
it the core and center of his final message 
to the world; and that was the insufficiency 
of Intellectualism: its total inadequacy, 
above all, in the greatest of all quests: the 
quest after God. 


[ 79 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


Writing of Bergson’s great work, “Crea¬ 
tive Evolution,” already cited, lie says: 

“The vital achievement of the book is that 
it inflicts an irrevocable death-wound upon 
Intellectualism. It can never resuscitate! 
But it will die hard.—The spirit of profes¬ 
sionalism and pedantry—will rally for a 
desperate defense.—But the beast has its 
death-wound now.” (“Letters,” Vol. II, 
page 291.) 

“When you defer to what you suppose a 
certain authority in scientists as confirming 
these negations, I am surprised,” he writes 
to the correspondent who had deprecated his 
“superstitious tendencies.” “Of all insuffi¬ 
cient authorities as to the total nature of 
reality, give me the ‘scientists,’ from Mun- 
sterberg up, or down. Their interests are 
most incomplete and their professional con¬ 
ceit and bigotry immense. I know no nar¬ 
rower sect or club, in spite of their excellent 
authority in the lines of fact they have ex- 

[80] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

plored, and their splendid achievement 
there.” (“Letters,” Vol. II, page 270.) 

Writing of the Gifford lectures he was 
preparing in 1900, he says: 

“The problem I have set myself is a hard 
one: first, to defend (against all the preju¬ 
dices of my ‘class’) ‘experience’ against 
‘philosophy’ as being the real backbone of 
the world’s religious life—I mean prayer, 
guidance, and all that sort of thing immedi¬ 
ately and privately felt, as against high and 
noble general views of our world’s destiny 
and the world’s meaning; and second, to 
make the hearer or reader believe, what I 
myself invincibly do believe, that—the life 
of it” (religion) “is mankind’s most im¬ 
portant function.” (“Letters,” Vol. II, 
page 127.) 

The following year, he wrote: 

“In these lectures the ground I am taking 
is this: The mother sea and fountain-head 
of all religious life lie in the mystical ex- 

[81] 



THE DEEPER VOICE 


periences of the individual, taking the word 
mystical in a very wide sense.—One may 
almost say that they have no proper intel¬ 
lectual deliverance of their own, but belong 
to a region deeper, and more vital and prac¬ 
tical, than that which the intellect inhabits. 
For this they are also indestructible by in¬ 
tellectual arguments or criticisms.” (“Let¬ 
ters,” Vol. II, page 149.) 

The eyes of William James were “holden,” 
but he had the humility to own himself 
blind. What he himself could not see, he 
could admit was not by that fact disproved. 
Even in his blindness, he could grope 
toward what he felt to be the light: could 
say, “I need it so it must be true!” 

It was when he came closest to the view¬ 
point of the humblest of God’s children that 
he was nearest to the realization of his life’s 
agonizing wish to see God. 

True humbling is many-sided, and in all 
exalting; the very sense of limitation which 
is inherent in it means emancipation from 

[82] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


the tyranny of limitation; means freedom 
from the stultifying weakness of making in¬ 
capacity the measuring-rod of the universe. 
It is those who being blind say, “We see,” 
who are doing most to lead astray in that 
search for God which is “mankind’s most 
important function.” 

All truth is God’s truth. It is the very 
extremity of narrow-mindedness to inveigh 
against the discoveries of science as inimical 
to religion. The man of science, in his own 
sphere, is a servant of God bringing to light 
the wonders of his universe. But discoveries 
of science are discoveries in the realm of 
things physical and not of things spiritual 
—to which the man of science is apt to be of 
all men most blind. One of the most insidi¬ 
ous dangers of modern life is the extent to 
which this blindness is unrecognized, and the 
“most insufficient of all authorities upon the 
total nature of reality” undertakes to pro¬ 
nounce the final word thereon. 

The “frightful danger” in which the 

[ 83 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


young stand from those to whom they “en¬ 
trust their understanding” was pointed out 
long before our day, by one of the greatest 
of all teachers. Socrates says, or is made 
by Plato to say, of those in whose hands was 
the “higher education" of the time: 

“If you are skilled in that matter, and 
know what is good or bad, you may certainly 
buy science of Protagoras and of all other 
sophists; but if you are not skilled in it, 
have a care, my dear Hippocrates, that when 
you go there, you do not make a very bad 
market, and hazard that which, of all things 
in the world, is dearest to you, for the risk 
we run in buying sciences is far greater than 
that which we run in buying provisions. 
After we have bought the last, they may be 
carried home in vessels which they cannot 
spoil.—But it is not the same with sciences, 
we cannot put them into any other vessel 
than the mind; as soon as the bargain is 
made, it must of necessity be carried away, 
and that too in the soul itself; and we must 

[84] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


withdraw with it, being either enriched or 
ruined for the rest of our days.” (Plato’s 
“Dialogues.” Protagoras.) 

There is still “frightful danger” in “buy¬ 
ing sciences.” But the trouble is not in the 
sciences, in so far as they are authentic 
sciences. It is in the presumption which 
will not admit ignorance. He is a safe 
teacher, and he only, who knows the metes 
and bounds of his own knowledge, and pre¬ 
tends to no authority beyond. 


[ 85 ] 


Chapter VII 

THE NEW SENTIMENTALISM 





Chapter VII 


THE NEW SENTIMENTALISM 

A feeling of “Who is sufficient for these 
things?’’ is the very touchstone of fitness to 
approach “these things”: the matters per¬ 
taining to humanity’s highest concern, re¬ 
ligion. That diffidence is little in evidence 
to-day. Almost anybody will, at a mo¬ 
ment’s notice, dispose of the whole subject; 
very' frequently, in some pleasant popular 
formula which leaves “subtilties” comforta¬ 
bly aside and emphasizes the humanitarian 
merely. 

Every period has its own sentimentalism. 
The Victorians smiled at the mock pastoral- 
ism, the sophisticated simplicities, of the 
eighteenth century: at its patched and 
hooped shepherdesses, its powdered and 

[89] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

periwigged shepherds, at its whole parapher¬ 
nalia of the romantically picturesque. We 
in turn are contemptuous of Victorian senti¬ 
mentality; of the prettiness which travestied 
reality in their art, literature, and manners. 
Large-eyed, tiny-mouthed maidens, curl on 
shoulder, fondling doves or fawns, do not in 
our pictures stand for womanhood. Poverty 
in our fiction is not Spotlessly clean,” im¬ 
peccably honest, admirably content, nor 
given to talking a sort of blank verse in 
moments of high emotion. “Happiness ever 
after” is not now taken for granted as me¬ 
chanically following the marriage ceremony. 
One’s bath, one’s breakfast, are looked upon 
as worthier themes for poetry than the 
“little faded flower” over which the verse¬ 
mongers of other days solemnly sentimen¬ 
talized. Yet we have our own sentimental¬ 
ism—of a more dangerous sort than that of 
the Victorians or of their predecessors. It 
is sentimentalism invading the realm of the 
moral and spiritual. 

[90] 


THE NEW SENTIMENTALISM 


This is all the more deplorable as vitiating 
to-day’s undeniable effort to get away from 
phrases and catchwords and to come down 
to the bedrock of reality in the great con¬ 
cerns of humanity. Religion above all is 
being subjected to re-statement in the effort 
to fix upon the fundamental thing in the 
whole duty of man; which is not—how often 
and how insistently we are told!—that a 
man should seek the salvation of his soul. 

A man, over and over again it is insisted, 
were he properly “selfless,” would be 
sublimely indifferent to the salvation of his 
soul. His religion would be for others 
rather than for himself. It would not even 
“begin at home,” but begin somehow in the 
general spectacle of humanity; in the draw 
of its appeal upon man’s latent generosities 
and nobilities. 

If I may but serve my generation, what 
matter is it what sort of person I am? Why 
should I even care—if I am properly “self¬ 
less”? Yet I think those who have greatly 

[91] 



THE DEEPER VOICE 


served their generation, and generations fol¬ 
lowing, have cared. Our splendid young sol¬ 
diers have cared. They have been willing to 
give their lives—but at any cost they must 
conserve themselves. That is their spiritual 
keynote even, where their type is highest: 
an exquisiteness of regard for the selfhood 
woven of intangible things. They loved the 
cause of country and of right as they could 
not have loved it, had they “loved not honor 
more.” 

A man, it has been freely granted, should 

care for fortitude, and courage, and honor, 

and generosity, and kindness, and seek to 

• 

cultivate them. But by no means must he 
be concerned about his soul. Where then 
are these fine flowers to flourish? As a mat¬ 
ter of fact, a man’s “soul” considerably 
matters, even to his neighbors, and its “sal¬ 
vation” may be no unimportant public bene¬ 
fit, even if it incidentally carries with it the 
purely individual consolation of assurance 
of a future life of happiness—upon which 

[92] 


THE NEW SENTIMENTALISM 


our super-ethics has learned to look askance. 

There are, perhaps, worse forms of selfish¬ 
ness than that which rejoices in hope of a 
home awaiting in the “many mansions.” 
The Founder of Christianity evidently 
feared no deleterious effects from this 
source; nor did he scruple to speak of re¬ 
ward and punishment, manifestly as appeal¬ 
ing to perfectly legitimate human instincts; 
but “salvation” in the scheme of Christian¬ 
ity, it should be needless to say, means in¬ 
finitely more than attainment of future good 
or escape from future ill. It means the sav¬ 
ing—now—of the soul’s life; which number¬ 
less things conspire to smother out. 

In the spiritual realm, I maintain, self- 
preservation is a law rightfully first. Upon 
my spiritual integrity depends all my power 
to help others. The slack talk of “self- 
interest” in this connection is of a piece with 
the internationalism which discredits pa¬ 
triotism. Nor is the salvation of one’s soul 
a thing so easily achieved that it may safely 

[ 93 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

be left to sheer chance. It is life’s supreme 
adventure—its costliest enterprise. 

One little field, and one only, in all the 
broad domain of the world of spirit may I 
cultivate. It is beyond comparison the most 
sacred of trusts. To neglect it, under plea 
of “disinterestedness” would be folly indeed, 
and wrong not to myself alone. I owe to 
the world all that I ought to be—and can¬ 
not be without the help of the Higher-than-I. 
That help, vouchsafed, is salvation. 

For a considerable time, new, somewhat 
trumpery phrases have tended to tyrannize 
over us. The “selfishness” of seeking sal¬ 
vation—how often one has encountered 
sapient deliverances upon that score; back 
of which, one cannot but think, lies no little 
of confusion of thought, or of that absence 
of thinking which convenient phrases so 
comfortably permit. The “selfishness” of 
seeking to rise to a spiritual plane of which 
unselfishness and all other high human vir¬ 
tues are radical part—! 

[ 94 ] 




THE NEW SENTIMENTALISM 

The new sentimentalism takes no account 
of that duty to self which is duty to God 
—or indeed of God, except “poetically.” 
Not long ago, I heard an exponent of this 
school, in the person of a poet-clergyman, 
eulogizing a “dear old atheist” of his ac¬ 
quaintance, and smilingly deprecating “the 
dear old atheist’s” artless belief that his lack 
of belief was of any particular importance. 

Walter Scott was gloriously romantic, but 
he was not sentimental; least of all after the 
fashion of the new sentimentalism; or he 
would never have created that great scene 
which is the climax of the “Heart of Mid¬ 
lothian” : the scene in which Jeanie Deans, 
agonizing for her sister whom a word of 
hers might save from the gallows, refuses to 
perjure herself. 

This, after all, is a moral order in which 
we live. One of the worst of all enemies 
to society is he who obscures that truth, 
as consistently and constantly the represen¬ 
tatives of the new sentimentalism are ob- 

[95] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


souring it, washing out distinction between 
good and evil, true and false, in wishy-washy 
floods of “breadth” and “charity.” A bland 
and smiling complacency, an “everything-is- 
lovely” attitude—even with the addition of 
a vague social idealism—is not enough 
wherewith to meet life, which perpetually 
challenges the utmost strength of the soul; 
life in which yet reigns the terrible law, 
“The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” Who 
does not know instances of the working of 
law: dreadful putrefactions of personality 
suddenly manifesting themselves, arising 
from the slow, unsuspected dying of the soul 
within? 

It is rather a serious matter to gloss over 
a possibility like that—or to make merely 
“poetical” that which stands over against 
it. Decidedly, in this perilous world, at 
this time of crisis, there should be no place 
for the new sentimentalism. 

The “new sentimentalism” indeed is not 
new; close at hand, chronologically, as is 

[96] 


I 



THE NEW SENTIMENTALISM 


lie past from which it sprang. Between us 
and that past a great gulf has opened. The 
“new sentimentalism,” rooted in shallow 
optimism, already grows patently anachro¬ 
nistic. 

Sociology itself to-day takes account of 
“regeneration”—individual moral redemp¬ 
tion—as the sole real hope of society. The 
day of Utopias is past. Reconstruction of 
human relations and conditions must come 
“from within.” 

“Out of the trouble and tragedy of this 
present time,” says H. G. Wells, “may 
emerge a moral and intellectual revival, a 
religious revival, of a simplicity and scope 
to draw together men of alien races and now 
discrete traditions into one common and 
sustained way of living for the world’s 
service.—Religious emotion—may presently 
blow through life again like a great wind, 
bursting the doors and flinging open the 
shutters of the individual life, and making 
many things possible and easy that in these 

[97] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


present days of exhaustion seem almost too 
difficult to desire.” (“Outline of History,” 
Vol. II, page 582.) 

Wliat is to kindle that all-beneficent po¬ 
tency of emotion? Fruitful as he has been 
of suggested “religions” to replace Chris¬ 
tianity, indomitably resourceful as his mind 
is, he has, upon that crucial point, no clew 
to offer. 

As a matter of fact, there is none, except 
in the religion of Jesus Christ. When he 
shall draw all men unto him, then, and then 
only, will they be drawn together in unity of 
spirit. Then, and then only, will Love be 
the great controlling power in the affairs of 
men. And the kingdom of God will have 
come—“from within.” 


[ 98 ] 



Chapter VIII 
MOVING MOUNTAINS 






Chapter VIII 


MOVING MOUNTAINS 

“From within,” it is interesting to note, 
has been the very keynote of cults which 
have arisen in rivalry of evangelical Chris¬ 
tianity: interesting if only as tending to 
corroborate the bold assertion which some 
one has made that “every heresy had its 
origin in an effort to defend some neglected 
truth.” Our Christianity has, to an un¬ 
precedented extent, minimized the impor¬ 
tance of the subjective; Christian Science, 
and other kindred cults, take their stand 
solely upon subjectivity. 

Their “gospel,” needless to say, is that of 
boundless possibilities latent in every man, 
and evokable through effort of his own will. 
To that end, they enjoin the putting aside 
of self-restriction—careful abstention from 

[ 101 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


envy, hatred, malice, and all other corrod¬ 
ing, anti-social emotions—and the bathing 
of the soul in the balm of kindliness and 
benevolence. Resolute resistance is pre¬ 
scribed to the paralyzing poisons of worry, 
fear, foreboding; and constant cultivation 
of the heartening virtues of cheerfulness and 
courage. But first of all and chief of all 
there is opened before the mind the possi¬ 
bility of ascent from any depth of sordid¬ 
ness, from any dullness of the commonplace, 
into dynamic relation with the Infinite and 
Eternal, in whatever vague, impersonal 
fashion conceived. 

Conceived in vague impersonal fashion, 
the Infinite and Eternal in the popular 
metaphysical cults is as real a fact as elec¬ 
tricity or steam: a power as open to invo¬ 
cation in the every-day affairs of men. Per¬ 
fectly plain-minded people—and it is impos¬ 
sible to look into the literature of New 
Thought and Christian Science without see¬ 
ing that their appeal is made largely to 

[ 102 ] 



MOVING MOUNTAINS 


what may be termed the intellectual “mid¬ 
dle class”—are led to the exercise of a sort 
of practical mysticism; not, apparently, 
without astonishing results in the redemp¬ 
tion of life from at least minor ills; aston¬ 
ishing most of all when one considers the 
defects, positive and negative, in the faith 
which they follow. 

I once “summer-boarded” in the house 
with a very commonplace-looking little 
eleven-year-old girl, a child notable at first 
merely for a very large and healthy appetite. 
She was an entirely prosaic young person, 
I fancied, until I saw her transformed into 
something like beauty by her ardent advo¬ 
cacy of Christian Science. There was noth¬ 
ing goody-goody in her recommendation of 
it; no suggestion of the angelic children in 
starched pantalets and corkscrew ringlets 
who bravely reproved and admonished their 
elders in early-Victorian Sunday-school lit¬ 
erature. She was evidently unaware of any 
occasion for courage in admitting another 

[103] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


to a knowledge of a superlatively good 
thing: a thing good in the most everyday 
contingencies of life. She had her own testi¬ 
mony of a burn which Christian Science had 
made “all right.” 

I have not the smallest doubt that the 
burn was made better. It became, at any 
rate, “all right”—a source of disturbance no 
longer in the higher economy of her being. 
Such things are of everyday occurrence in 
Christian Science, far as it is from being 
either Christian or scientific, or a sound and 
dependable therapeutic system; many be¬ 
yond question as are the tragedies which are 
caused by over-reliance upon such help as 
it can give. 

Even where, as with New Thought, so- 
called, there is no claim of specific relation 
to Christianity; where Christianity, indeed, 
is merely made one of perfectly equal and 
coordinate developments of the religious in¬ 
stinct in mankind, all alike to be included 
under a patronizing, not to say Chadband- 

[104] 


MOVING MOUNTAINS 

ish, Peace be unto you—authentic results 
may apparently, temporarily at least, be 
achieved in the promotion of health, happi¬ 
ness, efficiency, through the power of inner 
“uplift.” 

One may smile at the assurance of a cele¬ 
brated New Thought writer, that when the 
human soul makes itself “translucent to the 
divine” not only will all failure and evil of 
whatever sort be eliminated from the life, 
but there will be developed such charm of 
personality as will make the very horse you 
pass in the street “turn his head with a 
strange, half-human, longing look.” One 
may smile at many crudities, extravagances, 
absurdities; may smile at many things—and 
at many cease to smile; at some be moved to 
shudder even; above all at the freedom with 
which the attainment of “Christhood” is 
placed within the scope of human endeavor 
—in virtual denial of the very nature of 
Christhood. But an agency which can show 
real, even though transitory, fruitage of “up- 

[105] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

lift” is not to be dismissed with a Podsnap- 
pian wave of the arm. There is in it some 
secret well worth searching out. 

“Believe and love,” for the release of lat¬ 
ent efficacies of mind, is the instruction of 
the popular metaphysical cults. “Believe 
and love” is their formula for overcoming all 
ills, even to the ills of the flesh. And thou¬ 
sands—if only for reasons essentially secu¬ 
lar and selfish—have been trying to believe 
and love, the very effort, beyond question, 
bringing more or less of benefit, moral and 
physical. 

It is one of the strangest things in this 
strange world that “this-world religions,” if 
religions they may be called, should say, 
“Believe and love,” with an emphasis which 
our latter-day Christianity has not em¬ 
ployed; that they, and not it, should lay 
stress upon the things of the soul, and ex¬ 
hort to self-examination, meditation, prayer, 
or such poor substitute for prayer as is in 
their systems possible; that they, rather 

[ 106 ] 


MOVING MOUNTAINS 


than it, should emphasize the unseen and the 
eternal, and seek to lift life to higher levels 
thereby—if only to higher levels of temporal 
power. 

Concern with “states of mind” has long 
ceased to form part of a “healthy” Chris¬ 
tianity: held healthy strictly in proportion 
to its objectivity; in proportion, that is to 
say, to its identification with Social Service, 
that mere corollary of Christianity. Medi¬ 
tation of him has still been sweet, doubtless, 
to many a silent soul, and the hidden source 
of spiritual strength, but the very word 
‘meditation’ has passed out of our Christian 
vocabulary, so that it strikes strangely upon 
the ear. Almost it seems to belong to the 
far-off times of Bunyan, Herbert, Taylor— 
the great seers, saints, preachers, of the sev¬ 
enteenth century, who, blissfully unaware 
of the dangers lurking in “mere emotion” 
did not scruple to bathe their souls in love 
to God. 

Nowadays we have learned that every 

[107] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


emotion requires an outlet in action, and 
that the indulgence of mere emotion is an 
injurious thing. Accordingly we have 
looked with distrust upon “mere emotion,” 
forgetting that what may seem “mere emo¬ 
tion” may have its own not clearly evident 
way of finding outlet in action; may through 
a thousand unsuspected channels find ex¬ 
pression in deeds;—forgetting that true love 
of God is never “mere emotion,” but in¬ 
variably the source and spring of outward 
effect incomparably beneficent. 

So too, though the Christian has prayed 
and found comfort and support in prayer, 
the incalculable potentialities which reside 
in prayer and its absolute necessity to the 
Christian life have been but little empha¬ 
sized. What wonder that our Christianity 
has been comparatively impotent to move 
mountains? 

A little wistfully, a little resentfully, we 
of the churches have looked on and wan¬ 
dered, as one and another of our number 

[ 108 ] 


MOVING MOUNTAINS 


would turn his—or more frequently her— 
back on Christianity as a thing outworn 
and futile, and try Christian Science, or 
some other metaphysical cult, for the power 
which apparently is in it of “casting out 
devils,’’ if only the imps of care, fear, worry, 
irritability, gloom—to which our Christian¬ 
ity has seemed to say so little; strange as 
that is in view of what it does say in words 
as plain as human language holds; words 
from the lips of Christ himself. 

It is interesting sometimes to stop and 
consider how far we are from believing what 
we profess to believe in perfectly ordinary 
everyday matters. Do I believe that the 
earth revolves as a modest satellite around 
the mammoth refulgence of the sun? Some¬ 
times, perhaps. Not often, certainly. As a 
general thing, I am afraid, the sun to me is 
a shining object in shape and size like a 
glorified dinner-plate, rising from nothing¬ 
ness in the east, and sliding across the sur¬ 
face of the sky to extinction in the west. 

[109] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


I fear that I am in reality as little a believer 
in the Copernican scheme of the universe 
as a small girl of my acquaintance who was 
asked by her geography teacher to tell what 
she knew of the “surface of the earth.” All 
she knew was that she “had never seen it.” 
“Where do you live?” her teacher prompted. 
She knew that, at any rate. “On the in¬ 
side,” she said. 

I too—and I suspect most of us—live “on 
the inside,” so far as our habitual thinking 
goes. We live on a flat earth, covered over 
with a solid dome conveniently equipped 
with a lighting arrangement of sun and 
moon, and charmingly decorated with the 
little stars; the little stars whose magni¬ 
tudes make the mind reel when one does 
happen to believe in them; magnitudes 
which make our world, our solar system 
even, sink almost into nothingness. 

It is curious to think what a difference in 
our lives our Christianity would make if we 

[ 110 ] 



MOVING MOUNTAINS 


really believed in it—as we believe in gravi¬ 
tation, say. 

I do profoundly and seriously believe that 
if I should walk out of my second-story win¬ 
dow I should break my neck upon the 
ground below. If I could in the same simple 
and absolute fashion accept the eternal veri¬ 
ties revealed in Christianity, what could it 
be less than complete newness of life, in an 
utterly new world? 

It would mean the opening of potentiali¬ 
ties ranging from a reality of intercourse 
with the divine making negligible “whether 
in the body or out of the body,” down to 
the maintenance, amid the petty cares and 
worries of every day, of an impregnable 
peace. It would mean a state of mind and 
a conduct of life in the highest degree con¬ 
ducive to bodily health—aside even from 
specific answers to prayer in cure of the 
sick, of which there are now, doubtless, and 
have always been, far more than we know. 

tin] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

It would mean not only prevailing prayer, 
but a spirit of prayer which is, in a way, its 
own answer: an opening of the very win¬ 
dows of Heaven: that region so close by, 
and so closed to us, of eternal peace. 

At this moment, in a time of comparative 
desuetude, Christianity is the greatest 
agency of “uplift”—not only potentially but 
actually—in all the world. “The everlast¬ 
ing mercies” every day reach and rescue the 
otherwise hopelessly lost and degraded; the 
quickening Spirit makes alive that which 
was dead. What except Christianity at¬ 
tempts even such work as this—or the 
stanching of the life-blood of the heart which 
is wounded unto death? “Out of the depths 
have I cried unto thee, O Lord.” Out of 
the depths, there will always be a crying 
unto him, as the One alone mighty to save. 
Sheer idle mockery seems talk of “cosmic 
consciousness,” of one’s own “divine self,” 
of the magic of masterful “affirming” and 
“denying.” The need of the deeply- 

[ 112 ] 


MOVING MOUNTAINS 

distressed soul is to see God in the face of 
Jesus Christ, and to reach out to the 
warmth and strength of his helping hand. 
The need of all needs is to be able to say: 
“Though, he slay me yet will I trust him.” 

It takes no prophet to foresee, as a conse¬ 
quence of the troubled days which have come 
upon the world, a revulsion toward a Chris¬ 
tianity at once simpler and more profound, 
more mystical and more personal: a Chris¬ 
tianity permeated with the consciousness of 
a Power whose ways are past finding out— 
transcending all but an implicit trust: a 
Christianity which is first of all, and essen¬ 
tially, a relation between God and the in¬ 
dividual human soul: that authentic, dy¬ 
namic Christianity the very greatness of 
which makes its inalienable first condition 
^becoming as a little child.” 

The remedy for the drift to “cults” is not 
common-sense; not the piling up of perfectly 
available proofs of failure and inadequacy 
—nor any other sort of indictment. Though 

[113] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


there may well be such danger signals for 
the unwary, the real antidote lies in the 
preaching, through the power of the Holy 
Spirit, of a profounder and more vital Chris¬ 
tianity. 

Never was there a more rationalistic age 
than that which gave birth to John Wesley, 
the man of prayer and vision. In that age, 
as in all others, there was at the heart of 
humanity a deep inarticulate cry after the 
true and living God, ready to break forth 
like water from the desert rock at the 
prophet’s word. And the Wesleyan revival, 
I repeat, was the revival of spiritual Chris¬ 
tianity in a time of coldness, formalism, ra¬ 
tionalistic tendency, recourse in preaching 
to more or less unworthy adventitious at¬ 
traction. The preacher who would be popu¬ 
lar elaborated his rhetoric and cultivated 
his personal graces, touched on timely 
topics, introduced a leaven of flippancy 
(“courting a grin when he should woo a 
sour’) and had his rew T ard of “vogue.” 

[114] 


MOVING MOUNTAINS 


Meanwhile there arose a voice crying in the 
wilderness: a preacher of the “simple 
gospel” in its original integrity of divine 
revelation, superhuman demand, inscrutable 
mystery, transcendent promise. And the 
hearts of men hearkened. 

Through faith were wrought the benefits, 
social and moral, which followed: the puri¬ 
fying of manners, the reform of abuses, the 
establishing of philanthropies—an effect 
still seen to be admirable to an epoch-mak¬ 
ing degree. But the faith which did all 
this has, in recent years, to a singular ex¬ 
tent, been tacitly discredited among us. 
Faith in faith has seemed almost moribund. 
Distinctly it needs to be revived if Christian¬ 
ity is to realize its mission of moving moun¬ 
tains, social and personal, as it alone can do. 


fH5] 





Chapter IX 

SHALL HE FIND FAITH? 








Chapter IX 


SHALL HE FIND FAITH? 

There was never yet upon earth an Age 
of Faith; most assuredly not in the time of 
dense ignorance and blind credulity some¬ 
times so denominated, when priestly tradi¬ 
tion tyrannized over a subservient Christen¬ 
dom. In all periods faith has been a thing 
as rare as precious; a thing difficult and 
costly. There have ever been lions in the 
way of its achievement from those early 
days when the thought of literal lions in 
bloody Roman arenas chilled the “will to 
believe” until now, when shock and sophisti¬ 
cation seem to stand as chief obstacles. 
Nay, how many even heard the words of 
Christ from his own lips, looked upon his 
face, and saw his mighty works, without 
surmounting some sordid hindrance which 
held them aloof from faith: worldly interest, 

[119] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

family ties, cowardice, stupidity, prejudice, 
or what not. 

The very virtue of faith lies largely in the 
fact that it may not be lightly and super¬ 
ficially attained—that its demand is that 
depth shall call unto depth. Good old Sir 
Thomas Browne, rejoicing in the very diffi¬ 
culties of faith, too easily assumes that the 
way of faith may be too facile, overlooking 
the principle which he himself has laid 
down: 

“To credit ordinary and visible objects,” 
he says, “is not faith, but persuasion. Some 
believe the better for seeing Christ’s sepul¬ 
chre ; and when they have seen the Red Sea, 
doubt not of the miracle. Now, contrarily, 
I bless myself and am thankful that I lived 
not in the days of miracles; that I never 
saw Christ nor his disciples. I would not 
have been one of those Israelites that passed 
the Red Sea, nor one of Christ’s patients 
on whom he wrought his wonders: then had 
my faith been thrust upon me; nor should 

[ 120 ] 


SHALL HE FIND FAITH? 


I enjoy that greater blessing pronounced to 
all that believe and saw not. It is an easy 
and necessary belief to credit what our eye 
and sense hath examined. I believe he was 
dead and buried and rose again; and desire 
to see him in his glory, rather than to con¬ 
template him in his cenotaph or sepulchre. 
Nor is this much to believe, as we have 
reason we owe this faith unto history. They 
only had the advantage of a bold and noble 
faith who lived before his coming, who upon 
obscure prophecies and mystical types could 
raise a belief, and expect apparent impossi¬ 
bilities.” (“Religio Medici,” page 17.) 

Faith, in truth, is thrust upon none. 
Always is possible the Great Refusal. And 
to that, always, leads the line of least resist¬ 
ance. Speculative difficulties may be now 
more, now less, to the fore, hindrances to 
open confession may vary, but the funda¬ 
mental difficulty of faith remains always the 
same. It lies in lives too narrow and petty 
to afford room to supreme Realities. 

[ 121 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


Faith, worthy of the name, is always as¬ 
similation—incorporation into the very 
nerve and fiber of life. And so Christ 
teaches in discourses which startled the first 
hearers, and were meant to startle; and 
which fall still startlingly upon our ears. 

Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, 
I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of 
the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have 
no life in you. 

Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my 
blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him 
up at the last day. 

For my flesh is meat indeed, and my 
blood is drink indeed. 

As the living Father hath sent me, and I 
live by the Father; so he that eateth me, 
even he shall live by me. 

An Orientalism! we say.—But they were 
Orientals who heard, and “strove among 
themselves saying, How can this man give 
us his flesh to eat?” 

With all the emphasis possible to put into 

[ 122 ] 


SHALL HE FIND FAITH? 

human words, he expresses our necessity of 
himself; not as a mere beautiful ideal, but 
as an intimate fact of our own individual 
lives; a necessity never to be abrogated as 
the crucial necessity of vital Christianity, 
and never to be easily and cheaply com¬ 
passed. 

The supreme necessity of our Christianity 
is that it should mean a real sense of a living 
Christ, as reachable by us to-day as he was 
by those among whom he walked his weary 
way on earth: by that inner circle even. 
But how one must reconstruct one’s very 
selfhood before that realization is possible! 
How one must purge it of its pettiness! 

In humbling and in humbling only I may 
lose the lower and find the higher self, whose 
very need of the divine bespeaks affinity with 
the divine. 

What our latter-day Christianity su¬ 
premely needs is the “Elan Vitale” —ex¬ 
panding, self-expressing Life. That life is 
Love: the love of God in Christ, in which 

[ 123 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


lies enfolded all that is vital in Christianity 
and all that is practical. 

“Who will love him most?” remains the 
most pertinent of religious questions; nay, 
of practical questions. If religion is a para¬ 
mount necessity of our lives, mere common 
prudence demands that it shall be reality, 
and not sham or shadow. There is abso¬ 
lutely no place in this dead-in-earnest world 
for mere sentimental or nominal religion; 
nor, in a world grown aware of the larger 
reaches of human life and destiny, for a re¬ 
ligion, so-called, concerned with the sec¬ 
ondary only. The fundamental in life calls 
for the fundamental in religion. “Who will 
love him most?” goes to the very heart of 
the matter. 

The spirit of obedience, the spirit of loy¬ 
alty, faith which w T orks by love—in these lie 
the potencies of Christianity. “Who will 
love him most?” is, I repeat, the great prac¬ 
tical question: the one most essential in de¬ 
termining the realism of religion. And still 

[ 124 ] 



SHALL HE FIND FAITH? 


the answer remains, He to whom most is 
forgiven. 

“If I wash thee not, thou hast no part in 
me,” said Christ to Peter—and to every man. 
What life is there which does not need that 
divine washing—the flooding in of divine 
forgiveness? Realism? The hope of it lies 
here: in a quickened sense of the need of 
that “washing.” 

“There is no place for the mediocre in 
religion,” said Charles Lamb in one of his 
rare moments of seriousness. “It is a thing 
which should burn and glow and tremble.” 
So too, the time is past when men may dis¬ 
miss “emotion” as a thing negligible in the 
wider ranges of human affairs. Winds of 
emotion from sinister regions of the soul 
are to-day the most destructive element 
abroad in the world; the winds of Hate 
which are beating against the four corners 
of civilization, and which have already 
smitten great nations into ruin. It is mani¬ 
fest as never before that society’s crucial 

[ 125 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


battles must be fought upon invisible fields; 
and that the conflict is between Hate and 
Love. 

“Religious emotion may presently blow 
through life again,” faint-heartedly the 
sociologist says; because, obviously, there 
is no other hope. Religious emotion will, 
very surely, “blow through life again, like a 
great wind bursting the doors and flinging 
open the shutters of individual life, and 
making many things possible and easy that 
in these present days of exhaustion seem 
almost too difficult to desire.” For what 
else than that is the coming of his kingdom 
—the kingdom of him who was and is em¬ 
bodied Love? 

Even now that great benign wind is gath¬ 
ering force in hearts which through faith 
discern him, not afar off but near, and know¬ 
ing them that are his: in hearts humble at 
once and sublimely confident—after the way 
of the little child. 


[ 126 ] 


Chapter X 
CONCLUSION 







Chapter X 


CONCLUSION 

Christianity is fundamentally a way: that 
which leads to something. It is plain, as it 
only needs to be plain, as a path for our 
feet. There is no obscurity about the com¬ 
mand of Christ: Follow me. Nor about the 
manner of the following. The wayfaring 
man, though a fool, need not err therein. 

To the intellectual of Paul’s day, as of 
ours, Christianity was “foolishness.” It\ 
was not reserved for modernity to find out 
that intelleetualism is of no avail toward 
the piercing of its mystery; toward attain¬ 
ment of that spiritual discernment without 
which Christ himself has no form nor come¬ 
liness. Only as one “comes unto the Father” 
through Christ may one know Christ—and 
know Christianity, in its fulfilled purpose. 

[ 129 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 

“The faith that lives in honest doubt’ : ’ has 
had its day—and failed. It is time to turn 
from the negative to the positive: to say 
once more, We would see Jesus; see him as 
a great present reality informing with di¬ 
vinity the dim reaches of the universe; see 
him as God-with-us, lifting human life to 
a new plane of glory and of power. 

No mere capitalization of good intentions 
can furnish forth an authentic religion— 
which must stand rather for some great ac¬ 
tuality as compelling upon life as sun upon 
solar system. To know whom I have be¬ 
lieved, is Christianity in all its sublimity 
and all its simplicity. In the reaching out 
to touch him is the bringing of its virtue 
forth. 

It is the Christianity of “reach” which is 
the conquering Christianity. The Chris¬ 
tianity which believes and loves and prays, 
which submits itself to the divine mastery 
of Christ, and seeks to fulfill his divine pur¬ 
poses—it is this Christianity, never in any 

[ 130 ] 


CONCLUSION 


age extinguished in humble and simple 
hearts, which alone furnishes any valid hope 
of a new earth, made new by inner transfor¬ 
mation of men. 

“The total nature of reality” defies the 
philosopher to-day as utterly as it has defied 
the philosophers of all ages. He has no 
word which is really adequate even to soothe 
that groveling fear of the unseen forces of 
the universe to which mankind is prone, and 
which has been the prolific root of dark, in¬ 
human heathenisms. Sometimes, indeed, 
one is almost driven to wonder whether 
heathenism's deadly wound may not be 
healed; whether out of blind fear may not 
be born anew dreadful attempts at pro¬ 
pitiation. There have been recrudescences 
scarcely less strange. And beyond all 
question there is a distinct, unwonted 
tendency nowadays to view as sinister the 
regnant Power of the universe. Defiant 
arraignment of the Higher than man fur¬ 
nishes to the literature of our time one of 

[ 131 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


its jnost characteristic notes; often taking 
shape in blasphemies almost unquotable. 

“The hidden God who does not wish to 
give up his secrets strikes down men who 
seek to take them!” a French surgeon, dying 
from the effects of prolonged experimenta¬ 
tion with the X-ray, was quoted, not long 
ago, as saying. Who can fail to feel in the 
words that which makes the very essence of 
heathenism ? 

There is a fear of God which is not “the 
beginning of wisdom/’ but a blight, rather, 
on all that is highest and best in life: a 
craven fear, degrading to man, dishonoring 
to God; which it is the work of “perfect 
love” to cast out. 

There is no fear in love, for fear hath tor¬ 
ment. And our heritage is peace. Still 
stands for us the “Fear not” of Christ—his 
“Let not your hearts be troubled. Ye be¬ 
lieve in God, believe also in me.” That and 
that only—believing in him—is the key to 
the kingdom of peace. 

[ 132 ] 


CONCLUSION 


Believing in him means a trusting sense 
of Love at the heart of the universe, despite 
mysteries of providence staggering to the 
mind. “How do you explain this, or that?” 
the perturbed question arises nowadays, 
how often! among Christians themselves, in 
face of the world’s distresses. “I don’t ex¬ 
plain,” is the only answer. “I trust!” 

There would be no room for trust, if we 
could explain. There is no faith but where 
doubt is possible. Who has faith at cloud¬ 
less noonday that the sun is in the sky? 
Night is the time for faith that there is a 
sun. 

“Blessed are they that have not seen, and 
yet have believed.” Hopeless perplexity it¬ 
self may work for good in compelling a pro¬ 
founder faith: recourse to that bed-rock of 
spiritual experience to which even the psy¬ 
chologist testifies as “indestructible”; trans¬ 
lating into his own language Paul’s trium¬ 
phant outcry: 

“Who shall separate us from the love of 

[ 133 ] 


THE DEEPER VOICE 


Christ?—I am persuaded that neither life, 
nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
powers, nor things present, nor things to 
come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other 
creature, shall be able to separate us from 
the love of Ood which is in Christ Jesus 
our lord.” 


THE END 



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